IBM's Tivoli software and Adobe's Acrobat have both been found this week to have critical vulnerabilities. Active exploits are already circulating for the Acrobat problem. Alan
@RISK is the SANS community's consensus bulletin summarizing the most important vulnerabilities and exploits identified during the past week and providing guidance on appropriate actions to protect your systems (PART I). It also includes a comprehensive list of all new vulnerabilities discovered in the past week (PART II).
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TRAINING UPDATE - - SANS CDI in Washington 30 courses; big security tools expo; lots of evening sessions: http://www.sans.org/cdi08/ - - London (12/1- 12/9) http://sans.org/london08/ - - Vancouver (11/17-11/22) http://www.sans.org/vancouver08/ - - Las Vegas (1/24-2/01) http://sans.org/securitywest09/ and in 100 other cites and on line any time: www.sans.org
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Part I for this issue has been compiled by Rob King at TippingPoint, a division of 3Com, as a by-product of that company's continuous effort to ensure that its intrusion prevention products effectively block exploits using known vulnerabilities. TippingPoint's analysis is complemented by input from a council of security managers from twelve large organizations who confidentially share with SANS the specific actions they have taken to protect their systems. A detailed description of the process may be found at http://www.sans.org/newsletters/cva/#process
Description: Adobe Acrobat is the most popular viewer for the Portable Document Format (PDF) on the internet. Flaws in the handling of JavaScript and other data embedded in PDF files could trigger one of a variety of flaws. Successfully exploiting one of these flaws would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Note that PDF documents are often opened by the vulnerable application upon receipt, without first prompting the user. Some technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability, and it is believed that at least some of these vulnerabilities are similar to vulnerabilities in other PDF processing products, expanding the area of available information. Multiple proofs-of-concept are publicly available for these vulnerabilities. It is believed that at least one of these vulnerabilities is being actively exploited in the wild.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: IBM Tivoli Storage Manager provides storage and backup management for a variety of platforms. A buffer overflow exists in its backup client for Microsoft SQL. A specially crafted request to this service could trigger this buffer overflow, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the vulnerable process (SYSTEM). Some technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability. An additional, possibly related, vulnerability exists in the client's scheduling code.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: NOS Microsytems getPlus Download Manager is a popular software update manager, used by vendors including Adobe for Adobe's Acrobat product. The getPlus Download Manager contains a buffer overflow in its handling of user input. A specially crafted web page that instantiates the control could trigger this buffer overflow, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user. Some technical details are publicly available for this vulnerability. Note that the known exploit case requires that a malicious file be sourced from a domain ending in "adobe.com". This may significantly complicate exploitation, though at least one workaround is publicly known. When the ActiveX control is distributed by vendors other than Adobe, this restriction will likely not be present.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available. Users can mitigate the impact of this vulnerability by disabling the affected control via Microsoft's "kill bit" mechanism using CLSID "CF40ACC5-E1BB-4aff-AC72-04C2F616BCA7". Note that this will affect normal application functionality.
Description: SonicWALL Pro is a popular content security appliance. It can be used to block access to web sites based on a variety of filtering rules. It fails to properly sanitize some blocked URLs. A specially crafted URL that leads to a blocked website could inject arbitrary JavaScript into the error page returned by the appliance. This would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary JavaScript code in what users may think is a trusted web page. A proof-of-concept for this vulnerability is publicly available.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
This list is compiled by Qualys ( www.qualys.com ) as part of that company's ongoing effort to ensure its vulnerability management web service tests for all known vulnerabilities that can be scanned. As of this week Qualys scans for 5549 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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